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Livin'
With The Sims:
theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims,
asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual
life where everyone is Swedish?"

eadlines,
vacations, tons of stuff to make up. Sorry about the "rerun" last issue.
These things happen. :) This issue's going to be pretty brief, but hopefully
it'll show you what you can do with hand-drawing. Now, I want to get
something clear here...I'm an okay pixel artist, but I'm no Kenneth
Scott or Rowan Crawford or whatever, so this won't be up to their incredible
level of craftsmanship.

Okay, so when last we left
off, we had a nice piece of hand-drawn wood. Here it is again as a reminder:

Now we're going to take that,
and turn it into a trim. To start out, I've added some very basic shadows
and hilights using the dodge/burn tool and my tablet. You get something
that looks like this:

Not particularly nice looking
at the moment, but the pattern I'm trying to develop should be pretty
obvious.

This is just a shot of the
texture a little further along in progress. I'm using my art tablet,
and the dodge/burn tools, to add in detail.

I've now selected a specific
area to work on. I want to darken this edge without having the burning
bleed into the light area above it. Defining a selection's the easiest
way to do this.

Here we have the texture
with the top section mostly finished. I also added a little bit of RGB
noise to it, just for a bit more of a "random" look. I usually use "monochrome"
and not RGB, but with browns the multi-color blend tends to look more
realistic.